Sunday, September 8, 2013

Pod Delusion - Episode 203 - UK, Syria and Chemicals.

I know chemistry. Not loads but some. I work in the chemical industry, and (like many scientists) get frustrated from time to time about the miserably low level of basic knowledge of chemistry the average newspaper reader has. (I say "newspaper reader" - tabloid media especially seem to happily revel in ignorance, in the continual pursuit of headlines, and so sales.)The most recent offender was the Sunday Mail, with their story about UK "selling nerve gas chemicals to Syria". I wanted to write a piece about it anyway, but when the crunch came that no actual chemicals had been sent on the licenses that the Sunday Mail claimed had, it seemed too perfect to miss. Hence, the Pod Delusion piece, the script of which is further below.There is plenty to argue about whether business trumps all and regardless of the political state of a nation, we should be keen to transact but that's not really what this is about. The UK does tend to deal with most countries is most political states and has systems in place to try and mitigate the risks. But the point I was trying to make was that this is not like selling arms to a country (which UK also does, seemingly merrily) - this is about selling extremely common base chemicals which have myriad uses, some of which are bad. It escalated to "Britain sold nerve gas to Syria" which is wrong, silly, and massively unhelpful to people trying to think through how best they want our country to react to the situation in Syria.UPDATE: In a lovely twist of irony, the Mail on Sunday ran their front page today about previous export licenses the UK had given to companies exporting Sodium Fluoride to Syria.

You'll see the chemistry in 2 is exquisite. All you need is sodium fluoride, dimethylmethylphosphonate, phosphorus, alcohol, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. For a start, this is bollocks (surprise!). More importantly, dimethylmethylphosphonate is a Schedule 2 substance on the Chemical Weapons Convention which means it can't be exported to countries that are not party to the Convention (e.g. Syria). As an interesting aside, I wonder if iso-propylalcohol, which is also used in the synthesis of sarin and makes up a decent chunk of the sarin molecule (and is an even more commodity chemical with zillions of tons manufactured each year, so much so you can buy it on Amazon) would have caused the same stir if UK had exported that as well. I find it odd that despite the UK openly selling £12bn of ACTUAL WEAPONS to dictators and global ne'er-do-wells (including Syria's chums, Russia) that this sort of ill-informed, could-possibly might-have, I-dont-understand-chemistry-politics-or-risk type stories make the paper. Here is the script from the Pod Delusion piece.-----------------------------------------------------

Following on from last week’s segments on the use of
chemical weapons in Syria, this week we heard news that the UK had been caught
selling nerve gas chemicals to the regime, 10 months after the civil unrest
began. Or at least, that’s what was claimed.

This story is an excellent textbook example of …well… a
number of things:

1.How tabloid journalism works

and

2.How seemingly intelligent people can be fooled
by tabloid journalism

3.How tin foil hats are still all the rage.

So to the story.

On Sunday 1st Sept, the Sunday Mail in Scotland
(a rival of the The Scottish Sun newspaper, if you looking for a comparison)
splashed the shocking news that Britain had sold nerve gas chemicals to Syria.

In my short time as a grown-up, I have observed that tabloid
newspapers have a very casual relationship with the truth and don’t often
splash on huge world political stories of this nature. On the occasion that
they do, the story gets picked up by other media outlets very quickly and the
whole thing snowballs.

It would a HUGE story if the UK had been selling ANYONE
chemical weapons. As we learnt in last week’s Pod Delusion, the UK ratified the
Geneva protocol in 1930 and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1996.
This prohibits the development, production,
acquisition, stockpiling, transfer, and use of chemical weapons. It also
requires the destruction of existing chemical weapon stockpiles and the
destruction or conversion of chemical weapon production plants and storage
facilities. Really. This would have been massive.

The Sunday Mail is the Sunday edition of the The Daily
Record which has a circulation of 250 thousand newspapers per day and yet, even
so, by the end of the day, no other mainstream UK newspaper had taken up the
story. Huge red flag. In fact, I always find it bizarre that people who tend to
disdain tabloids will happily use them as prrof on the odd occasion they say
something that coincides with their belief – “Ah yes” they say, “the Daily Mail
NORMALLY is a bastion of right wing, anti-women, homophobic, race-bating but on
THIS occasion it’s really presented the arguments fairly and accurately”. Well,
as you wish.

Now let’s remind ourselves of the headline – Britain sold
nerve gas chemicals to Syria 10 months after civil unrest.

So did the UK sell chemical weapons? No. And if you are one
of the 1000s of people retweeting otherwise, go and buy yourself a new tinfoil
hat.

The newspaper described them as “nerve gas chemicals”. That
certainly sounds like chemical weapons, but reading on, the paper is referring
to sodium fluoride and potassium fluoride, saying that the chemicals are
capable of being used to make weapons such as sarin. Hmm. We’re already quite a
few steps back from the headline. But that’s how tabloid works, right? The
agreed rule is that the headline is to draw you in and doesn’t necessarily have
to be completely correct. Whatever.

Even well-known New Scientist consultant and science author
Marcus Chown (who should totally have known better) merrily confused the
difference between a chemical weapon and a possible chemical weapon raw
material and retweeted that “the UK sold nerve gas to Syria”, using the Sunday
Mail as a primary source. He appears to
now have quietly deleted these tweets.

In any case, it’s true – sodium fluoride can be used to make
chemical weapons. But here’s the stink. It can also be used to make a zillion
other things and is a bulk commodity base chemical. If you want to know how
scary and dangerous it is, have a look at your toothpaste ingredients – one of
sodium fluoride’s main uses is in fluoridation of water supplies and
toothpastes. There are millions of tonnes of this chemical made every year.
Sodium fluoride is used to make fluorocarbons, a type of which PTFE, better
known by DuPont’s brand TEFLON® - that’s how ubiquitous this stuff is. It’s
also why chemistry is so fascinating because these raw materials can be used
for myriad things and depending on the other chemicals in the pot you can make
medicines, toothpaste, frying pan coatings, treat metal surfaces, make wood
preservatives, making fire fighting foams, plumbers tape and, yes, sarin.

A fantastically useful base chemical can also be used to
make bad things as well as good things – so whaddydo?

In the UK, there are export licences for things we’d like to
keep tabs on. You can download the whole list – it’s 275 pages long, so rather
than read it out, I’ll get James to put a link in the show notes.

As it turns out, the EU (as we as part of it) has already
cottoned on to the idea that some things (not just chemicals, but electronics,
Navigation equipment and a host of other things) are fantastically useful but
also have the potential to be used by bad people, and so, Annex 1 on page 45
and for the following 230 pages,is the
list of items that are referred to as Dual Use. And there on page 108 is Sodium
Fluoride.

To get an export license, you
need to apply to the UK government with details of what the chemicals is, how
much of it, where it is going, what its going to be used for and lots of other
useful information. For countries like Syria there will be some sort of
investigation by the authorities to satisfy themselves that everything is legit
and the license is granted. This way the UK knows exactly what’s going where
and can revoke the licences at any time if it needs to.

Getting back to our story – the
Sunday Mail made the claim that Britain sold nerve gas chemicals to Syria 10
months after civil unrest. We’ve already seen that the headline is misleading
at best but the indignation had begun – MPs
began to get on their high horses “At best the government has been negligent
and at worst reckless to export material that could have been used to create
chemical weapons” said Labour MP Thomas Docherty. Others chimed in similarly.

And then late on Sun night, seemingly
unnoticed by The Independent, a weary government spokesperson presented the
facts – “In January 2012, we issued licences for sodium fluoride and potassium
fluoride. The exporter and recipient company demonstrated that the chemicals
were for a legitimate civilian end use - which was for metal finishing of
aluminium profiles used in making aluminium showers and aluminium window
frames.

"Before any of the chemicals were
exported, the licences were revoked following a revision to the sanctions
regime which came into force on 17 June 2012."

So the Sunday Mail story was wrong in nearly
every aspect. No chemicals had been exported, the dual-use system had been
followed meticulously and everyone had done their job satisfactorily well. No
story. Maybe just a lesson in why you shouldn’t read tabloids, and that despite
what science writers tells you, the UK has one of the most rigorous export
control systems in the world.

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About Me

Who I am is largely irrelevant, and indeed so are most of my thoughts.
Nonetheless, it winds me up that I am supposed to swallow half-truths and untruths relating to scientific claims emanating directly from media sources and indirectly from people who haven't a clue what they're talking about.
Look, you've got me started.
(You can email me at thinkingisdangerousblog AT googlemail DOT com.)